That Great Engine
by nflunza
Summary: Companion piece to "That Magnificent Brain," which you should definitely read before this one.  Answers the question, "What happened to Sherlock after he left John at Baker Street?"


That Great Engine

"I was wrong," he'd said to John in a manner one would almost call _cheeky_. Wrong about eliminating the impossible. The impossible was simply something no one had ever seen or contemplated before. Not even Sherlock Holmes had ever contemplated the dead returning to life to feast on the living.

_I was wrong, _he thought when the taxicab disgorged him at the emergency entrance of Princess Grace Hospital. Even before entering, he could see he was lamentably, unforgivably wrong.

Dozens of injured sat in hard molded plastic chairs, most holding makeshift bandages of towels and shirts, blouses and washcloths to their wounds. Dozens more milled around the waiting room, cradling wounds which were clearly not clotting, not scabbing, not healing. Each improvised bandage was soaked scarlet and dripping freely on the scuffed and gritty linoleum at their feet. The faces he saw as he entered the waiting room were young and old, white and brown, some crying, some cursing, some simply staring. But all the same, at the core. All the faces were _lost_, unable to regain their footing in a world which had so recently come unmoored. Unable to comprehend the reality of the impossible.

Holmes had long ago deduced that a tall, well-dressed man striding purposefully gave the appearance of belonging wherever he was headed and thus was seldom stopped. This held true again today, as injured and staff alike parted before him and gave him unquestioned access to the treatment area behind a set of double doors in the rear of the waiting room, assuming him a doctor or DI responding to the unfolding crisis. This assumption held at the nurses station, where he barked at the nearest scrub-clad woman.

"Where has the assaulted constable been taken?"

"I'm sorry, who-" she stammered.

"Come on, woman; Constable Peterson. Brought in less than 30 minutes ago. Where is he?"

"Trauma Three," she said, and pointed. "That way."

He left her without acknowledgment and walked quickly to indicated room, burst in the door, and was immediately seized by the reanimated cadaver of Constable Peterson.

Peterson's face was gray, except where it was smeared with red. His eyes were milky and empty of humanity, but focused and filled with terrible hunger. His head lunged forward like a cobra, his blood streaked teeth snapping at Holmes, seeking his throat. Peterson's own throat was a nightmare; seeping red and torn, muscle and sinew exposed and glistening in the fluorescent light. Holmes got his arms up between their bodies, pushing back at Peterson's chest and neck, craning away from the gore-streaked mouth, and cried out desperately for help. Peterson lunged again, and bit a chunk of flesh from Holmes' left wrist. He screamed in pain and loathing, and his stomach flipped as he watched Peterson chew the mouthful of flesh. He seemed to do it thoughtfully, as though evaluating the work of a new chef in an unfamiliar restaurant.

Holmes heard footsteps approaching the room at a run. _Help on the way_, he thought, knowing it was already too late. He spun his body violently right and gave Peterson a hard sudden shove, breaking free of his grasp and stumbling backwards. His feet tangled in some obstruction on the floor and he fell hard beside the gurney, striking his head on the wheeled bed's frame on the way down. He turned his head painfully and saw the body of a young doctor lying beside him, his face and upper chest half-eaten. What remained of the doctor's face was frozen in an expression of unbelieving horror.

_Should've seen that when I first came in,_ he thought groggily, and then was gone.

_He dreamed. _

_He dreamed often; the roaring engine of his hyperactive mind wouldn't be silenced by something as mundane as mere sleep. Even in sleep the fluttering wings strained at their restraints, sought to burst their cage and _know. _Know everything, solve every puzzle, understand the secret heart of every mystery. He searched ceaselessly, and not even his genius could tell him precisely what he sought. For now, it was simply enough to go on searching, reaching for more._

_This dream was different than his usual. He was inactive, sitting limply in his chair at his Baker Street flat, waiting for something. Soon, the door was opened and men arrived. They were faceless, anonymous men, dressed in the coveralls of workmen, and though each had a name embroidered over their left breast pocket, he found he couldn't read them. The men moved silently but quickly, and each of them moved to one of the cardboard boxes he suddenly noticed were arranged neatly on the floor of the flat. He understood that he was moving, and that his belongings had been packed into those boxes, and these men were here to take them. He watched impassively until the first of them actually left the doorway with a box in his arms, then suddenly found himself in the grip of rising panic. He didn't want to move. These men were stealing from him._

_They came back, waves of workers, carrying out boxes and furniture, unscrewing light fixtures, disassembling shelves. Each wave left him more panic-stricken, and also more empty. They were draining him, taking away all that had. He struggled to move in his chair, but found that his body would not accept his commands. He could only watch helplessly. _

_When the room was nearly empty, he espied a small wooden box on the floor near his feet. He couldn't recall ever owning such a box, but nonetheless knew it to be his. He felt driven to protect it and, straining with all his will, he managed to move a single foot and touch the box with his toe. Sweating with the effort of it, he slid the box back under his chair, out of the sight of the movers who were working ceaselessly to empty his flat._

_At last, it was only him in his chair, the small box hidden beneath, and a single dim light shining weakly down on him from somewhere overhead. The workmen stood in a loose semicircle before him, each of them wearing a name and a face that he felt he should recognize but could not. One of them stepped forward and, reaching up, unscrewed the remaining lightbulb, plunging the room into darkness. Then he heard-but did not feel-biting and tearing as the eating began._

He rose confused; his thoughts muddied, his head stuffed with cotton. He stood on legs like deadwood and stumbled toward the door of the trauma room. He didn't know where he was, or even who. Pain roared in his ears like the ocean, but nothing in particular seemed to hurt. He felt nothing at all, except unfocused pain, pain that felt like hunger, hunger that drove him to walk rather than lie back down.

The hospital was a charnel house, though he knew none of those words. He shuffled past the nurses station, where the body of the flustered nurse who'd directed him earlier lay dripping quietly onto the already gore-soaked floor. Her abdomen had been unzipped like a suitcase, and two of the patients who had previously been in the waiting room were busily reaching into her, extracting bloody treats and shoving them greedily into their mouths. He remembered none of them and walked past without noticing.

He was trying to think past the pain. Past the hunger.

He walked, directionless, because walking was what he did. He was WALK. He was HUNGER.

He was EAT.

They were't words in his head, but drives, imperatives. They were all he was. He took another step, and another, then his leg locked into place and he stood on one leg in the middle of a London street. He would have appeared comic in any other circumstance. He stood, shaking. He'd felt a flutter in his head, a thing that wasn't WALK or EAT or most importantly HUNGER. He directed all his energy at pursuing that flutter, and so was frozen in mid-stride on a street that smelled of burning flats and death.

There was more. More than WALK. More than HUNGER. He could feel it.

He thought a box. It lay in the center of his mind's eye, blurry and unfocused as though through a cataract. He swayed on one leg as he struggled to bring it into focus. It was small and wooden and lay before him. He tried to reach it and open it, open it like he would open a man HUNGER EAT-

He cried out in frustration, but produced only a low gurgling moan. The sound startled him, and in his mind he lurched forward and grasped the box in his numb hands. More than HUNGER. More than EAT. He pawed at the box. It opened. He slowly lowered his leg.

The vast engine of his once-great mind sputtered and choked in his head, but it moved. It moved and it said more than WALKEATHUNGER. Though he did walk again, and he did hunger, and he did wish to eat, his walk was no longer directionless. He drifted, unaware of it, toward Baker Street. Inside, wings fluttered weakly.

I used to be something else, he almost thought. He grasped for it, reached for it greedily as though it were a dangling intestine spilled from a young nurse, but it was just as slippery. The grasping, the reaching were more than he had been moments before.

The engine coughed. It wheezed. The wings twitched like a dream of flight. A woman ran past him, screaming. His course listed in her direction as though pulled by magnetism, HUNGER EAT, but the engine cranked again and he course corrected back to Baker Street, the woman forgotten.

I used to be more, moved sluggishly through his head, and he didn't understand the words. He had more. His eyes focused on the doorway ahead. The markings stirred him, the engine coughed and spit. _221 B Baker St. _ It almost meant something. The door was open, and he walked inside. Stood at the bottom of the stairs, swaying, very nearly thinking. He went up.

The door was closed. A flutter against a blood-crusted cage. He knew how to open it, and did. He moved silently through the sitting room, his mouth working. The engine turned over. The wings flitted. His mouth formed words he did not know and could not speak. He walked to the window and looked out over the vista of a London street that somehow burned across his mind more searingly than WALK or EAT or even HUNGER. The vast engine thrummed with untapped power. The wings tensed.

_I was more than this, _he thought. _I had a name. _The lights went, but he hardly noticed. He took another stumbling step toward the window. _I had a name._

He heard a creak behind him, a step that sounded so very familiar, and the engine cranked hard, pistons throwing off their rust, spark plugs firing like bottled lightning. He turned, slowly, and saw a figure there in the square of moonlight from the window, and the figure was a man and the man was a friend and the engine roared, roared like a wild beast, and the wings spread and swept down and pushed off the air and dared gravity to stop them and he thought, _My name is Sherlock Ho-_

And a gunshot stilled the great engine, forever.


End file.
